Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has been accepting luxury vacations — cruises on yachts, private jet flights and accommodations at five-star resorts — from billionaire Harlan Crow for over 20 years, as ProPublica has reported. Now the justice is coming clean, in part, disclosing Friday that a 2019 trip to Indonesia was indeed paid for by in late June was paid for by the Republican megadonor.
As ProPublica noted when it first reported on the trip to Bali, Thomas boarded a private jet for Indonesia, where he and his wife proceeded to island hop for nine days on a 162-foot superyacht with a private chef — a trip that would have cost him over $500,000 had he tried to pay for it himself.
In his annual financial disclosure, which usually notes gifts, travel and outside income from the previous year, Thomas admitted that Harlan and Kathy Crow paid for “food and lodging” for his Bali trip, CNN reported. The same month, Crow also paid for a four-day stay at a private club in Monte Rio, California — the home of Bohemian Grove, an exclusive, all-male retreat.
The annual disclosures are required from all justices, though Thomas’ reports have garnered considerably more attention given the sheer scale of the gifts, dwarfing those received by all other members of the court combined.
Thomas, who did not previously disclose such trips, had attempted to explain his selective reporting by stating that ethics officials had advised him not to report “personal hospitality” from friends. The fact that the justice decided to disclose Crow’s generosity indicates that it should have been included earlier, according to Politico.
George Conway, a conservative lawyer and critic of the modern Republican Party, said the disclosure points to the need for “a comprehensive criminal investigation, and congressional investigation, of Justice Thomas and his finances and his taxes.”
“What he has taken," Conway posted on Threads, "and what he has failed to disclose, is beyond belief, and has been so for quite some time."
